Did Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple?
He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU.
He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster.
Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.
No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships
Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture.
The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.
This is your actual headline:
You're basing the headline on a single FP64 test for a $600 laptop. Come on man.If your headline was being honest, it'd say "Apple A18 Pro is still 3-4x more efficient and significantly faster than Intel's low end chip in common tasks".
If this isn't an undisclosed sponsored review, then it's just misleading clickbait for Youtube views. It's clearly working for you.
You can do better.
I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it.
For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.
Just because this title did the best doesn't make it not misleading. If you are a serious reviewer, it wouldn't have been an option in the first place.
You can make an even more outlandish title and get even more views. Doesn't make it right.
since it's too much to paste in here, here's 10 recent tech review videos from each of the top 10 most viewed tech youtubers:
https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf
Here's a few of them:
- Humane AI Pin Review: The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed
- I Tested the World's Craziest Smartphone
- Do NOT Buy These Fake Tech Products!
- This Is Not a Normal Laptop...
- Unboxing the $10,000 Mystery Tech Box
- Don't Make This PC Building Mistake
- This Desk Accessory Changes Everything
- I Didn't Expect This Phone to Be This Good
- I Bought a Mystery Tech Box from Amazon
- Testing the Craziest Cheap Tech on Temu
Jeff Geerling's videos have fine titles.
Declaring that Jeff can't be a serious reviewer because he uses clickbait is kinda silly. Have you seen the state of journalism? Somehow the tabloids are frequently less clickbaity.
You are trying to launder responsibility for a clickbait title to a computer program. Then you try to shift the topic to the public good you are providing.
I don’t think it’s wrong to use clickbait, but come on, own up to it. You consciously chose to “let [YouTube] pick it.”
I never said it wasn't clickbait.
If you don't like it, either install DeArrow or subscribe to my blog, where I tone it down for the more technical audience. (Or block/ignore my content, no skin off my back!)
That's why you're not a serious reviewer. If you're serious, you wouldn't mislead people.
Even your blog post does not tell the truth nor does it have highlights of benchmarks that represent how people will actually use a $600 laptop.
The people who are buying these laptops are likely not very technical and it's your job to guide them. They wouldn't know that an FP64 test on the $600 laptop is near useless - yet you base the entire conclusion on it.
Jeff has a day job. He is not a professional reviewer. He shows cool products and showcases what he’s passionate about. YouTube as a medium requires clickbait - that’s the belly of the beast.
I'm not denying that clickbait works on Youtube. He's amassed 1 million Youtube subscribers doing clickbait it seems.
My problem is that both the clickbait title and the conclusion are straight up wrong and misleading.
Even clickbait titles on Youtube will often have the correct conclusion. This is not the case here.
Jeff, you may want to think about your credibility going forward. Please avoid becoming one of the "influencers" who collect pennies via clicks.
You have an opportunity to be continue to be taken seriously like you have been so far.
Surely there must be some way to avoid mis-leading clickbait titles.
Separately, asking your fellow community-members to not bother, and that too with an unaffected shrug, just kills the conversation we would want to have with you.
Getting performance per watt out of the smaller CPUs is actually more impressive because they can't amortize the non-CPU power draws in the system over as much performance. Increasing the performance while maintaining that performance per watt is then entirely straightforward because you just use more of the same cores.
Except Intel's Core 5 320 is almost certainly bigger than the A18 Pro CPU.
They both have 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores.
Yes, they both have the same and Intel cores are known to be bigger than AMD and Apple cores but poor in area/performance.
So I'm not sure what your original post about smaller cores is all about considering that the A18 Pro CPU is almost certainly smaller in actual die size.
It's not about die area at all. It's about the SSD and chipset and WiFi etc. each using power on top of what the CPU uses, and ending up as a much larger percentage of system power draw for a 15W CPU than for the same system with a 60W CPU that has around four times the multi-thread performance by having four times as many of the exact same cores.
You lost me.
Maybe you can articulate what you're arguing from the start?
Suppose you have a system that under some workload will draw 10W to run the chipset, WiFi, SSD and so on and another 15W to run the CPU, so that it's 25W in total. The 15W CPU has X number of cores and gets a score of 1000 on some benchmark. Performance per watt is 40 points per watt.
If you put 4X of the same cores in the same system then the CPU uses 60W, the WiFi etc. still use 10W, so the whole system uses 70W. It scores 4000 points and the performance per watt is 57 points per watt. You got four times the multi-thread performance and performance per watt went up.
That's why any CPU reviewer worth their salt will isolate CPU power.
> This is like saying my Intel Pentium 3 matches Apple M5 in perf/watt
... if it was within orders of magnitude of being true, perhaps.